Month: January 2019

I recently got really excited when I noticed, that the number of page views on my blog suddenly sky-rocketed from around 70 to over 300! What brought me back down to earth was the fact, that I also received around 120 spam comments on that single day. Luckily all of those were reliably caught by Antispam Bee.

Sudden peaks in page view and spam comment statistics.

Still, it would be nice to have accurate statistics about page views and those stupid spam requests distort the number of views. Also I’d like to fight spam with tooth and nail, so simply filtering out the comments is not enough for me.

That’s why I did some research and found out about the plugin WP Fail2Ban Redux, which allows logging of spammed comments for integration with the famous fail2ban tool. The plugin does not come with a settings page, so any settings and options have to be defined in the wp-config.php. In my case it was sufficient to just add the following setting:

/path/to/wordpress/wp-config.php

define('ANTISPAM_BEE_LOG_FILE', '/var/log/spam.log');

Now, whenever Antispam Bee classifies a comment as spam, the IP of the author is logged in the given log file.

Now all I need it to configure fail2ban to read host names from that file and to swing that ban hammer!

/etc/fail2ban/filter.d/antispambee.conf

[INCLUDES] # Read common prefixes. If any customizations available -- read them from# common.local before = common.conf

Requirements on encryption change from time to time. New technologies pop up and crypto protocols get replaced by new ones. There are also different use-cases that require different encryption techniques.

For that reason there is a number of encryption protocols specified for XMPP, amongst them OMEMO and OpenPGP for XMPP.

Most crypto protocols share in common, that they all aim at encrypting certain parts of the message that is being sent, so that only the recipient(s) can read the encrypted content.

OMEMO is currently only capable to encrypt the messages body. For that reason the body of the message is being encrypted and stored in a <payload/> element, which is added to the message. This is inconvenient, as it makes OMEMO quite inflexible. The protocol cannot be used to secure arbitrary extension elements, which might contain sensitive content as well.

The modern OpenPGP for XMPP XEP also uses <payload/> elements, but to transport arbitrary extension elements. The difference is, that in OpenPGP, the payload elements contain the actual payload as plaintext. Those <payload/> elements are embedded in either a <crypt/> or <signcrypt/> element, depending on whether or not the message will be signed and then passed through OpenPGP encryption. The resulting ciphertext is then appended to the message element in form of a <openpgp/> element.

Upon receiving a message containing an <openpgp/> element, the receiver decrypts the content of it, does some verity checks and then replaces the <openpgp/> element of the message with the extension elements contained in the <payload/> element. That way the original, unencrypted message is constructed.

The benefit of this technique is that the <payload/> element can in fact contain any number of arbitrary extension elements. This makes OpenPGP for XMPPs take on encrypting message content way more flexible.

A logical next step would be to take OpenPGP for XMPPs <payload/> elements and move them to a new XEP, which specifies their use in a unified way. This can then be used by OMEMO and any other encryption protocol as well.

The motivation behind this is, that it would broaden the scope of encryption to cover more parts of the message, like read markers and other metadata.

It could also become easier to implement end-to-end encryption in other scenarios such as Jingle file transfer. Even though there is Jingle Encrypted Transports, this protocol only protects the stream itself and leaves the metadata such as filename, size etc. in the clear. A unified <encrypted/> element would make it easier to encrypt such metadata and could be the better approach to the problem.

Federated Networks are AWESOME! When I first learned about the concept of federation when I started using Jabber/XMPP, I was blown away. I could set up my own private chat server on a Raspberry Pi and still be able to communicate with people from the internet. I did not rely on external service providers and instead could run my service on my own hardware.

About a year ago or so I learned about ActivityPub, another federated protocol, which allows users to share their thoughts, post links, videos and other content. Mastodon is probably the most prominent service that uses ActivityPub to create a Twitter-like microblogging platform.

But there are other examples like PeerTube, a YouTube-like video platform which allows users to upload, view and share videos with each other. Pleroma allows users to create longer posts than Mastodon and Plume can be used to create whole blogs. PixelFed aims to recreate the Instagram experience and Prismo is a federated Reddit alternative.

But the best thing about ActivityPub: All those services federate not only per service, but only across each other. For instance, you can follow PeerTube creators from your Mastodon account!

And now the icing on the cake: You can now also follow this particular blog! It is traveling the fediverse under the handle @vanitasvitae@blog.jabberhead.tk

Matthias Pfefferle wrote a WordPress plugin, that teaches your WordPress blog to talk to other services using the ActivityPub protocol. That makes all my blog posts available in and a part of the fediverse. You can even comment on the posts from within Mastodon for example!

In my opinion, the internet is too heavily depending on centralized services. Having decentralized services that are united in federation is an awesome way to take back control.

Just a quick hint: Mike Kuketz released a blog post about how you can use Blokada to block ads and trackers on your android device. In his post, he explains how Blokada uses a private VPN to block DNS requests to known tracker/ad sites and recommends a set of rules to configure the app for best experience.

He also briefly mentions F-Droid and gives some arguments, why you should get your apps from there instead of the Play Store.

The blog post is written in German and is available on kuketz-blog.de.